|9780822968924|Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture| The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges….

|9780822968528|A Critical History of the Green Revolution|In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug’s complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and left a legacy that divides opinions even today. His high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties, known as miracle seeds, effectively doubled and tripled crop yields across the globe, from Kenya to India and Argentina to Mexico, due to their wide adaptation. But these modern seeds also…

|9780822948575|The Correspondence, January 1878-November 1881|The 500 letters in this sixteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall document the period from January 1, 1878, to December 31, 1881. They chart a defining stage in the later life and career of an aging John Tyndall with unprecedented detail. Key developments evidence the fragility of a self-fashioned Carlylean hero, one whose sustenance increasingly relied on the companionate, domestic partnership that he enjoyed with his wife, Louisa. While they vacationed in the new summer home they built together in the Swiss Alps, where they experienced a shared reverence for nature, Louisa immersed herself…

|9780822949251|Bio-Inspired Objects and the Engineering of Life|For centuries, scientists have looked to nature for models when inventing new technologies. From Bionics to Biohybridsshows how ideas drawn from biology have inspired new ways of making and thinking—from robots modeled on living organisms to materials that mimic natural processes. Through vivid examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Marco Tamborini explores how these “bio-inspired” innovations reshape what we know about science, design, and the natural world itself. By bringing together the history of science and the philosophy of technology, Tamborini reveals how evolving research practices blur the boundaries between the natural and…

|9780822968429|Bio-Inspired Objects and the Engineering of Life|For centuries, scientists have looked to nature for models when inventing new technologies. From Bionics to Biohybridsshows how ideas drawn from biology have inspired new ways of making and thinking—from robots modeled on living organisms to materials that mimic natural processes. Through vivid examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Marco Tamborini explores how these “bio-inspired” innovations reshape what we know about science, design, and the natural world itself. By bringing together the history of science and the philosophy of technology, Tamborini reveals how evolving research practices blur the boundaries between the natural and…